I Made a Free GitHub Copilot Alternative Using Chinese AI Models

GitHub Copilot costs $19/month. OpenAI's API needs a credit card. And if you're outside the US, getting set up with either can be a real headache. So I built NovAI Coder - a free, open-source Windows app that gives you AI coding assistance through 7 Chinese AI models that rival GPT-4o in quality. Why Chinese AI Models? DeepSeek V3.2 scores 90.2% on HumanEval - the exact same as GPT-4o. But it costs $0.14 per million input tokens vs GPT-4o's $2.50. That's 18x cheaper. The catch? Accessing these models directly requires a Chinese number and navigating Chinese-language dashboards.